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Welcome to the website of Professor Kenny Coventry

Kenny holds a Chair in Psychology, and is Head of the School of Psychology at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is a chartered psychologist, Fellow of the British Psychological Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and recipient of the British Psychological Society 2015 Cognitive Prize.

Research

Kenny is a psychological scientist, with specific expertise in human communication and decision making. His main research area is investigating how different mental abilities in the mind/brain interact. This has been manifest in a long-standing interest in the relationship between language and perception, and the mapping between language and the vision and action systems in particular. A second interest is how cognition and emotion interact in decision making under conditions of uncertainty. More information about Kenny’s research and publications can be found here.

History

After studying psychology at Glasgow University, he completed a PhD in Cognitive Science and Psychology at Edinburgh University (with a thesis on spatial language). This was followed by posts at the University of Dundee, Plymouth University, Northumbria University Newcastle (including Associate Dean Research and Enterprise, and Director of the Cognition and Communication Research Centre), and visiting Professorships at Bremen and Freiburg Universities (collaborating with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft SFB-TR8 Spatial Cognition Research Centre). He is also a former Fellow of the Hanse Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany.

He took up the post of inaugural Head of the School of Psychology at the University of East Anglia in 2012.